I became the Leadership Editor of Forbes in December 2008, just as the American business world was crashing down and taking the jobs and homes of millions with it. Had I started the job a year or two earlier, I might have found that covering things like how to be a manager, corporate strategy, risk management, governance, and corporate social responsibility was worthy but possibly sometimes a little dull. Now I found that my beat was everything that had gone terribly wrong and was going to have to go very right to get us all back to prosperity. Since then, I've had the pleasure of publishing some of the world's best minds on every aspect of leadership.
Previously I was a senior editor of Forbes magazine, and before that I was for many years the managing editor of American Heritage and the editor of the quarterly Invention & Technology. I've emceed the annual induction ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, done the play-by-play over the P.A. system on a cruise ship as it passed through the Panama Canal, and written on the history of bourbon whiskey and the making of Steinway pianos, among many, many other things. I prepared for all that by majoring in music in college and writing a senior thesis on the music of Hector Berlioz.
Follow me on Twitter here.

In the days since the election we have learned that President Barack Obama‘s campaign had an amazingly advanced and disciplined ground game that knew just what precincts and even voters to target and how to target them, based on polling information that predicted how the vote was going with uncanny precision. Yet Mitt Romney was the man running as the experienced manager, the man whose years running a business uniquely qualified him to run the biggest, most complex organization on earth, the federal government. That was his main, most consistent claim to the office. Now it looks more as if, though he may have been very good at buying and selling companies and extracting profit from them, he wasn’t nearly as good at heading an effective complex organization as President Obama.

Obama executed quantifiable long-term plans, adaptable short-term planning, an innovative GOTV initiative and plotted better ad strategies, while Romney had the ORCA trainwreck [see below], inaccurate internal polling, poorly informed managers and insufficient fiscal planning (e.g. coffers too low in July to react to the Obama ad blitz seems so minor league!). Not to mention its upper management was rewarded with bonuses in September, right after the languid convention and the embarrassing European trip.

The blogger Allahpundit has a very good post about the difference in the organizational success of the campaigns, in which he writes,

This was supposed to be Romney’s strength, the reason to prefer him to Gingrich, Santorum, etc. Even if he didn’t always seem so “severely conservative,” he could be trusted to hold his own against Team Hopenchange in a battle of the ground games. After all, that’s his brand — he’s a managerial genius. If anyone could build a company capable of capturing the presidency, he could.

Allahpundit cites a Romney campaign worker’s account of Project Orca, which the campaign described as “a massive undertaking – the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election.” It involved using smartphones on election day to figure out which precincts weren’t producing enough voters, so help could be rushed to them to turn out the vote. But it was incompetently set up and planned for and was a wreck on election day, and according to that campaign worker:

the end result was that 30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help. Like driving people to the polls, phone-banking, walking door-to-door, etc. . . . If this had worked could it have closed the gap? I sure hope not for my sanity’s sake.

The bitter irony of this entire endeavor was that a supposedly small government candidate gutted the local structure of GOTV efforts in favor of a centralized, faceless organization in a far off place (in this case, their Boston headquarters). Wrap your head around that.

Here’s how Jonathan Last, who writes often for The Wall Street Journal and The Weekly Standard, puts it:

There was, to my mind, only one qualitative argument generally made in favor of Romney: that his management experience made him uniquely qualified to be president. He was a “turn-around artist.”A “genius CEO.” . . . At least this was a falsifiable claim. And the fact that Romney could not master even his own campaign organization in order to win an incredibly winnable election demonstrates–incontrovertibly–that it wasn’t true. If he was a turn-around artist, he would be president-elect right now.

Most political campaigns aren’t invalidated by a loss. A candidate puts forward an idea or a worldview and it can stand whether or not it’s embraced by voters. It has its own truth. But in the wake of his loss Romney’s campaign now looks ludicrous. He simply can’t be a “genius” of managing and salvaging and not win.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.

Comments

Lets say this. When you repeatedly lie over and over and over about just about everything, there is a BIG segment of society that is going to buy into it. When you have the number of people on handouts does anyone really think they are going to let that ship sail? Perhaps its when its a dirty fight, one must get dirty.

Romney was clearly out-lied by Obama. O distorted and lied about every facet of the Romney proposals. When he couldn’t directly criticize Romney he invented a lie to spread. He kept saying Romney’s revenue neutral tax reform was a $5 trillion tax cut for the “wealthy.” He kept saying Romney was a “vulture capitalist” who destroyed jobs when in fact he saved the majority of companies from going out of business. He continuously assassinated the character of the most virtuous man to run for president in the last 100 years. Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth, V Lenin.

Onwards to the glorious collectivist Obama-care future, comrades

Continue on with Thelma and Louise government

“to elect such a man once may be regarded as a misfortune, but to elect him twice looks like carelessness. (Or, rather, criminal negligence.) “

Let’s all laugh out loud…. This must be Karl Rove speaking – i.e., trying to account for $400 million wasted on attack-adds and other fabrications against the President, most of these on RNC-controlled Fox News…!

Oh, let’s not forget Mitt Romney’s “closing argument” in Ohio: Chrysler was shipping Jeep jobs to China… A blatant lie that the auto maker felt obliged to take the rare step of denouncing… Romney a “Moral man”?

Check back with us in four years. Many have watched the awkward struggles of an unprepared Barack Obama. He lacked the resume for the big job he got, and proceeded to prove he’s probably better at being a college professor than he is in wrangling his Congress to action. Reagan, Clinton, Bush all did this much better. Word is – Woodward’s The Price of Politics – Joe Biden does his messy and hard work with congress. Mr. Obama has photo opps. to attend.

Yes, very interesting point – a ground game is classic Operations, behind the scenes “keeping the trains running.” So ironic that the President’s team clearly outperformed the business executive’s team in this regard.

Romney a managerial genius? The evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out. He did not respond to objective evidence, dismissing it as if it were “science.” He allowed his beliefs to trump facts. He did not set objective goals and manage to them. He allowed the project ORCA to produce typical Big Software results: 80% of their projects fail. He spent a huge amount of money on a huge project – getting elected – then failed to react to the indicator that the project was failing even though the indicators were quite public and quite obvious. Studies show that much of “success” at the top managerial level is cumulative advantage, you do well on something early by chance, then are promoted based on that, you get more training and more money, which equates to more time to spend on the next project, etc. Eventual failures are written off as flukes, even though they’re the norm. Romney seems to me to be one of these outlier geniuses, born lucky and leveraging that cumulative advantage for all it’s worth. I can’t say I see anything about him that indicates that he is good.

Romney a managerial genius? The evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out. He did not respond to objective evidence, dismissing it as if it were “science” to an evangelical preacher. He allowed his beliefs that the “polls were skewed” to trump facts. He did not set objective goals and manage to them. He allowed the project ORCA to produce typical Big Software results: 80% of their projects fail. He spent a huge amount of money on a huge project – getting elected – then failed to react to the indicator that the project was failing even though the indicators were quite public and quite obvious. Studies show that much of “success” at the top managerial level is simply cumulative advantage, you do well on something early by chance, then are promoted based on that, you get more training and more money, which equates to more time to spend on the next project, etc. Eventual failures are written off as flukes, even though they’re the norm. Romney seems to me to be one of these outlier geniuses, born lucky and leveraging that cumulative advantage for all it’s worth. I can’t say I see anything about him that indicates that he is good.